This Is for Everyone by Tim Berners-Lee
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I read This Is for Everyone by Tim Berners-Lee. Published in 2025. It’s his second book and a good, natural follow-up to Weaving the Web.
Notes
Tim Berners-Lee (“TBL” from here on) was 34 years old when he proposed the Web in 1989. He released the first website (info.cern.ch) in December 1990 (not 1991 like I’d thought for some reason). That was a week before his first child was born, and his wife had their second child three years later. I guess you can do good work with young kids.
He’s 70 now publishing this book.
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Europe was hesitant to adopt TCP/IP because it was associated with the US Pentagon. So it sounds like there was almost a “Splinternet” before the internet even was. There was a “protocol war” in the early 80s. Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn invented TCP/IP.
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TBL called a programming language he created “Timpl” (Tim’s Programming Language). Sounds like “simple.” Pretty great name, actually, but he was understandably self-conscious about it being self-centered.
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TBL is decidedly against domains as an asset class (page 75). So, domain investing (“domaining”). His opinion carries weight. Although he didn’t invent domains, he invented their most enduring killer app.
Before the Web, email was the internet’s’ first killer app. Newsgroups were next—like Reddit but decentralized (more like AT Protocol/Bluesky?). Telnet and FTP were also early internet successes.
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TBL called it the World Wide Web because that name is “wonky, memorable, and practical” (page 63). I’ve also been wondering what the point of the www subdomain was, and it sounds like it was meant to distinguish the web from other internet domain usage, like FTP and email.
Speaking of naming things, “Internet” is literal as in Inter-net, like, between networks or a network of networks.
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TBL is currently concerned about authoritarian abuse of the internet and social media, misinformation. Me, too.
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RSA public-private key encryption was really important. Based on elegant mechanism of multiplying primes.
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TBL has been into AI and agents since the 90s. What’s old is new.